ABSTRACT
When I ®rst heard that my city was signing up to a policy of forcible detention and relocation of refugees, I was ashamed and angry. When I heard that people ¯eeing persecution and torture were to be labelled `asylum seekers', not refugees, and were to be assumed to be lying until they could prove the truth of their tragic stories, I vowed never to use the term myself. I sought to distance myself from the new agencies springing up to manage the in¯ux of bewildered souls shunted up the M1 by the coachload on a weekly basis.
